Intro

The Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network (NSRN) is an international and interdisciplinary network of researchers; the network was founded in 2008 to centralise existing research on the topic of nonreligion and secularity and to facilitate discussion in this area.

This website - launched in December 2011 - is our new home on the internet. To find out more about the changes to the site, please have a look around, or see the 'About Us' section for more information. Meanwhile, we hope you enjoy the site and welcome your feedback and suggestions for additions and improvements.

Chris, the managing editor of the NSRN website, is also one of the Religious Studies Project’s ‘editors-in-chief’ and therefore, when the NSRN wanted to make available some podcasts from recent events, it seemed like a win-win situation for both organizations for the RSP to host and disseminate these podcasts on behalf of the NSRN. These lectures come as part of an extensive series of podcasts from the RSP which touch on the study of non-religion – from a recent roundtable discussion on Studying Nonreligion within Religious Studies, to interviews with Linda Woodhead, Callum Brown, and Lois Lee.

For those of you who don’t know the RSP, please take a moment to survey religiousstudiesproject.com which features a few dozen of their weekly podcasts with leading international scholars on exciting developments in theory, method and empirical study within the social-scientific study of religion, in addition to roundtable discussions, book reviews, feature essays, opportunities digests, and more. The RSP is presented with generous support from the British Association for the Study of Religions.

As the RSP has a wider remit than the NSRN, they did not wish to fill all of their listeners inboxes with five quite lengthy podcasts and, therefore, have not made these podcasts available though their iTunes channel. However, they are all available on the RSP website and shall be linked to from the NSRN website. Due to the lecture style of these recordings, it is somewhat inevitable that the audio quality will be lower than we would like, and that there might be references to PowerPoint presentations or other events happening in the room. However, we know that these will be minor irritations when compared with the stimulating scholarship that you are about to hear, and we are very grateful to the RSP for working with us to bring you these lectures.